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Putting her elbows onto the soft ground, she pushed herself up to sit before she realized it was not sand she was on but grass. Looking out over the land around her in astonishment, she wondered at the beauty of a side of nature she’d never seen. At least not in the real world. She’d only ever seen lush green grass like this in the children’s books she’d read as a child.
The vibrancy of the world around her held her frozen in awe.
Even Niamh’s and Sage’s places couldn’t compete.
Trees, actual healthy trees! An entire forest of them surrounded her full of vibrant life. The colors of the world were so much more than the dull tans and browns she’d grown up with in Ifreann. Brighter and just absolutely beautiful. She wondered if she even knew the names of all the colors around her.
Standing, Bryn walked toward an open path in the trees, an instinct telling her to move down it, and she heeded the call. Nothing here felt dangerous like it did in her small world.
Stepping past the first line of trees, crows flew in and out of the branches overhead as she watched and took in the fluid avian dance. As they played, swooping above her, the sun gave way to the moon in mere minutes instead of hours, and the path beckoned her farther along.
As she walked, the moon tripled in the sky, before becoming one again. Curious, she still didn’t feel fear as she thought maybe she should. Instead, it felt familiar.
If anything, she felt right at home here. This was all a dream, it had to be, but oh how she wished it were real. To have a vision of the future, knowing she’d be in such a place was more than she could conceive.
Howls called to the moon, and Bryn could see the shadows of wolves running through the trees on both sides of her. Between the wolves and crows keeping her attention, she stumbled as she walked into something, catching herself on a stone. No, not just a stone.
A headstone.
Strong wind gusts pushed her forward, and she stepped farther into the cemetery, something she’d never seen before since their dead were burned on the pyres. She hated that the Church of Baleros would never allow bodies to be buried or anything put in the ground to remind them of lost loved ones.
Death begets death.
Lies.
It just seemed so wrong to just forget their loved ones because the people of their town feared death so much.
Bryn was never allowed to speak of her father again to Mallory. Only in the dark of night when she had a nightmare, and Jace slept on her floor, did she speak of her father to another person.
Sensing something heading her way, almost like a beacon of power in the back of her mind, she tracked it until a horse, black as night, broke through the trees, making its way toward her.
A kinship with the animal pulsed through her before the large war-horse halted its canter at the gate of the cemetery. Snorting, it walked steadily over the hallowed ground, tossing its mane, and watching her with eyes of the purest black. No light reflected in the equine eyes.
Senan.
The name whispered to her, and she knew instinctively that this was her horse and that was its name. At least some former version of herself anyway.
“You return to us finally, my queen?”
Putting her hand to Senan’s neck as the horse approached her, she noticed blue tattoos all over her arms and hands.
Taking her hand back from Senan’s neck, earning a nip of agitation from the horse, Bryn turned her hands over, the blue markings running up and down both of her arms. The curves and twists were all symbols, but she had no idea what they meant. Intertwined rings and triangles... they had to mean something.
“Will you take back the mantle you were born for?” An echo of voices wove in the air around Bryn as a howl tore through the night, met by another.
A silver wolf broke through the tree line as it ran toward where she stood next to Senan. While not hostile in its demeanor at all, she held her breath.
Bryn held still while the silver wolf sniffed her before licking her hand playfully, its dark-brown eyes almost black looking up at her with an affection that caught her breath before it could leave her lungs. Her hands ran over its fur, and the wolf leaned against her in appreciation.
An affection was there with the wolf she wished she could take back to the waking world. He seemed to care for her even more than Finian.
Two ghostly figures in black cloaks, one short and one close to her height, approached her from the woods, and the silver wolf growled, putting itself between her and the figures. She pushed her fingers into the ruff at the back of its neck, trying to calm it, but the wolf stayed on high alert.
“Hello, Bryndis Kenneally,”one woman said, her voice much older.
“No need for your guardian. We mean you no harm,”the other one, a youthful voice, stated as the women pushed back their hoods. Before her stood an older version of herself and herself as a child of barely ten. Both of them looked at her with an intensity that made her palms sweat.
When she didn’t answer their greeting in return, too awestruck to respond, they moved as one to her with outstretched hands. Their blue markings matched the ones on her own arms, line for line.
